This booklet contains the text of the reply which Sigrid Undset (1882-1949), a Nobel Laurate novelist, sent, shortly after she received the Prize in 1927, to a Catholic priest in Oslo. By then Sigrid Undset had been a Catholic for three years and an active member of the little Catholic community in Norway, or rather, in Oslo. The priest wanted to know why Sigrid Undset referred time and again to marriage as a sacrament, although it was a mere contract for Protestants and even more so to wholly secularized Norwegians. Her reply is a masterpiece in theology and moral philosophy, but written with an immediacy characteristic of a great novelist, who could have easily become one of the outstanding Catholic apologists of the twentieth century. First published in the Norwegian Catholic periodical Credo, the Reply to a parish priest first appeared in English translation in 1934 in Stages on the Road, a collection of her essays on the Catholic past, and remained buried in that collection, although it would have deserved to be put in wide circulation in a pamphlet form. In the Introduction Fr. Stanley L. Jaki gives also an account of Sigrid Undset's life as being the essential background of her great literary and apologetic activity and shows why the Reply to a Parish priest should have been given the title, Through moral crises to Catholicism.

By Sigrid Undset  •  Introduction by Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

ISBN 978-0-9774826-9-6  •  32 pages  •  softcover